Cannibal Corpse, M/C

There was an open door at the end of the corridor and he knew very well what would be in that room. God, how he knew it. Go ahead, Johnny. Go take a look at death and know the pain it inspires and the bleak finality it lays upon the soul like an iron door clanging shut that will never, ever be opened again.

Enough. He would not be ruled by fear and regret and channeled guilt.

He looked in the room.

Apache Dan’s corpse was flopped in a pool of ever-spreading blood that was so darkly red it was nearly black. He sucked in a sharp breath. It was as he had expected, except for the fact that his brother’s head was missing and that was the final indignity of his mortification and degradation.

A frozen terror spread out inside him, chilling all it touched, and he felt like an ice sculpture waiting to melt. His life had not been a good one when you put it under the microscope and dissected it layer by layer. There was suffering and pain. There had been hunger and squalor as a child and petty crime as a teenager followed by violence and murder, drug dealing and misery as an adult, years of incarceration in brutal hardtime joints. And all he’d ever really had through the sad roll of those latter years was his brothers, his patched brothers, the Devil’s Disciples. They were his equilibrium, his support system, his sanity. The cool water in his throat and the hot food in his belly. The hands to clasp and the shoulders to bear his weight.

Gone now.

All gone.

Because he knew, God how he knew, that Moondog was gone, too. It had been that crazy death-happy bastard’s plan from the beginning to ride the War Wagon into his own personal blood-drenched biker heaven of Valhalla. He was gone. Apache Dan was gone. Shanks, Irish, Fish, and probably Jumbo, too.

“I’m sorry, my brother,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

He turned back into the heavy silence of the corridor and breathed deep its air, which was stale and dusty, almost gritty in his throat. Okay. Okay. Time to go, But then—

Thud, thud, thump-thump-thump.

What the fuck?

He stepped around the final bend of the corridor, playing his light around. He saw a set of steps and then something came thudding down them: Apache’s head. Sure, over-the-top, high melodrama and Grand Guignol, but wasn’t it almost to be expected? The head hit the landing and rolled to a stop and other than seeing its whipping blue-black locks, Slaughter did not look at it; there was no point.

He stepped closer to the landing.

He sucked in great whooping gasps of stale air which carried a sickly-sweet after-odor of putrefaction to it. It was getting so the smell of death was the rule rather than the exception.

A peal of chilling laughter drifted down from the landing high above.

The sound of it was telling, for it was the sort of laughter that would echo through subterranean depths and from the dripping hollows of midnight tombs. He went rigid, absolutely rigid, as he brought the beam of the flashlight up to reveal the crooked form that waited at the top of those crooked stairs.

The laughter again.

And in Slaughter, the mourning and grief and self-recrimination of this entire haphazard, perfectly fucked-up affair was shelved, and he felt hatred to his marrow and the need for payback to his core. He didn’t know who or what was up there but he was going after them, he was going to gut them, he was going to stuff them, he was going to mount their gamey ass on a fucking wall, so help him God. So as he charged up those stairs and that crooked shape retreated, he felt like he was put together out of heat and electricity; voltage looking for something to fry. In essence, about 110% pure undiluted death.

At the top, he saw the crooked figure, its back to him. He had the light on it and he saw the three-piece patch very clearly: the fanged skull in its pool of red, that single bloodshot eye staring out at him. The upper rocker: CANNIBAL CORPSE, M/C. And the lower: KANSAS CITY.

His blood ran hot.

The figure turned.

Death and resurrection hadn’t been exactly kind to Reptile. He had been a big, strapping fellow bulging with muscle and attitude, death kept at a low simmer in his black eyes…but now he was shrunken, leathery like brown hide, his face looking a little too much like the logo on the back of his denim vest: a skull covered in papery flesh like poorly dried papier mache, a living deathshead aswarm with red beetles that chewed and tunneled and devoured the thin scraps of face-meat that were left. His eyes were dun pockets of pestilence lidded by gray flaps, his bare chest crudely stitched like a stuffed Sunday chicken.